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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25460251">The Modern Prometheus</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi'>Papapaldi</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ancient Gallifrey, Gen, Origin Story, The Timeless Children</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 10:14:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>16,984</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25460251</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><em>“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”</em> – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein </p><p>There were once two children who lived on a planet that wasn’t yet called Gallifrey, though one of them was from somewhere else. They lived with a doctor, who was also a monster, who dreamt of carrying her species back from the brink of extinction. Millions of years later, the Master learns the truth. He succeeds where nature once failed, and razes Gallifrey to the ground.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>32</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. The Inventor</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is going to be long... I started writing it not too long after the finale but then school got in the way. It was my aim to write the whole thing before publishing but at this point I just want to share the parts I have, and I'll slowly chip away at the rest because I have a rough sort of plan. </p><p>It will alternate between two perspectives; the Master, and telling the story of the timeless child in a more detailed way. Essentially, I saw the post from @rowanthestrange on tumblr about that little boy shown in The Timeless Children actually being the first loom kid (and also the Master) and what can I say, I saw loom and I ran with it.</p><p>Edit: this story is on hiatus for now<br/>I plan to finish it but I want to Majorly rework things, particularly I'll be cutting most of the Master's perspective chapters (which is a lotttt of words but they weren't really working for me) and I've already taken them down. Guess I'll go all in on the Gallifreyan creation myth then. Maybe see you later.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The planet's original name is lost to history. One day it will be Gallifrey. Upon it, there lives a boy with no name. One day he will raze it to the ground.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Woorrldbuilding. That's it. That's the chapter</p><p>I don't remember if the actual episode mentioned that Tecteun was trying to save her race or if there was any sort of apocalyptic stakes to what she was doing, but I got a Vibe and I went with it. Also it's fun to think that even ancient Gallifrey is just the ruin of some previous civilisation, even if it never reached ~Time Lord~ heights.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>
  <span>There was once a planet that, to its inhabitants, was the world. It was desolate and unassuming, it’s palette molten red. The soil was dry; arid, barren – a burnished brown below orange skies. In the cradle of looming mountains, jagged sentinels against the twin-sunned horizon, a village rested. It drifted ever closer to a sleep like death. The world was harsh and cruel; cutting, hot, empty. It never rained anymore, the rivers and lakes had dried to glassy golden puddles in the mud. The soil was fallow and starved, and the animals were skeletons in the dust, else faring towards the fate. Birds flew titled and grotesque; long, stringy, jut-jointed things, rotting and foul-feathered. There used to be cities here, or so they said. Not many could remember them. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>On the hill above the village, there was an inventor. She was secretive, secluded, eccentric. She was brilliant, but disregarded, scolded and ignored by the villagers below. Her exploits followed the path left dusted over and forgotten by her society; procedure and numerical rigour. Science, rather than magic. Instead of blood and incense, her fingers were coated in oil and grime – rubber-gloved and slick with corrosives. The dwelling of she and her peers was rife with the cacophonous sounds of machinery – buzzing and whirring and trundling, grinding gears. These were the sounds of their temple, instead of voices; chanting, filling the space with foul, broiling spells. Science was an art practised more often in times gone past, but never truly ventured, never fulfilled, at least, not in the eyes of the inventor. The world – the universe, in fact, didn’t much favour science. Order was not a given, and laws were constantly in flux. Mathematics was a language ill-suited to the study of the surrounding chaos. These were all things that would come to change, to be quelled, and tamed – to be ruled.  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The Pythia were the ruling power – a matriarchal cult with their roots in long-practised religion, who were revered as an unrivalled theocratic power in the land. They dealt in blood and flame and prophecy, and as the long era of drought and plague continued to cast its pall over the world, with increasing reliance they turned to old stories and scriptures. They whispered tales that travelled, embellished, from the mouths of hermits and travellers and worn merchants – they said a great age of prosperity was coming. A light on the horizon – hope incarnate. The inventor didn’t have much patience for precognition. In her mind, the Pythia and their devout followers could toil in their crumbling temples, their water gardens long since dried to shallow rock pools, and dream of possible futures. As they wallowed, the inventor wished to reach them, to choose them. Shape them. Change requires action – that was the simple matter of cause and effect, a companion to entropy, and the essence of time. Cause, and effect. The inventor strived to shape the latter. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She worked, though predominantly alone, with a small group of apprentices, and very few equals. They worked there, in the facility on the hilltop on the outskirts of the village, and in the shadows on the mountains, in what might have once been a place of learning, a university. There weren’t enough people to have such places anymore, and not near enough experts to teach and maintain them. Science was an art passed down only to the lucky, or the particularly gifted, and to the determined. There were once channels of communication between the surrounding villages – small populations living in much larger, now deposed cities. The inventor had grown up hearing stories of grander times – times when the world was connected, when soft grass sprouted from richer soil. In such times, the suns were kinder and softer in their light, and there was food, water, and birth. Life accompanying death, instead of this slow and steady crawl toward extinction.  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She was a doctor as well as an inventor, but being a doctor these days was less about healing the sick, and more about keeping the dying as comfortable as possible. Unyielding crops, dwindling medicine. There was no way to combat the sicknesses ravaging the lands, in the insects, the brackish, dwindling water, the air. They were a hardy race – able to persist with little food, water, and sleep. Near reptilian, in that regard, with blood that ran cooler than most other mammalian lifeforms in the universe, with their expansive, white-bright suns above to keep them warm. Despite the advantage afforded by their biology, they withered. Children were born corpses, and still the robed and bejewelled Pythia in their mountainous convents preached of a coming light. Whether a prediction or a sweet lie, told to bolster the spirits of the world, no one knew. Perhaps they, too, only wished to keep the dying comfortable. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She was bent upon one goal; to help, to heal, and to discover. Her planet was dying. The only hope for her people was, she believed, not in the realm of tinted glass and incense – of smoke and mirrors and magic – but in science and exploration. There were worlds other than hers in the universe, and she wanted more than anything to learn the secrets they might hold. Her people could spy the shapes of them in the sky; big and round with promise. Someplace they could move to, colonise, or find some species they could introduce into their own soil, some form of life to engineer and to integrate. Some morsel of hope. Beyond her scientific exploits, and her drive to save her home, was a reckless sense of wanderlust. She was sick of red sand and stifling heat – of famine and sickness and Pythian preachers; inked, crimson-robed, silver-tongued. She wanted to escape, climb into the hap-dash shell of scrapped metal she called a ship, and fly away. Her pet project, one she spent many a starry, bitter night stretched beneath in goggles and tattered, brown leather, and oversized gloves, tinkering away. The hull was her sky, its scrapped, patch-worked underbelly a canopy above her as she worked, tools between her teeth – and it was almost ready. After all her years spent trying to save the planet from the ground, under the watchful and stifling eye of the Pythian might, enduring year upon year of failures and dead-ends – water treatment, engineered life, cybernetics and automation – she was ready to see what else the universe had to offer. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It was to be a solo mission, mostly because she knew just how risky an endeavour it was, but also because she trusted no one else in its undertaking. Besides, one pilot meant far less resources to waste. Space travel wasn’t exactly something they as a society had the desired infrastructure to accommodate. The ship was rusted and shoddy, and she knew the other scientists didn’t think it would work, but they respected her assumed futile efforts because they respected her intelligence. She was the best of all of them, that was quite clear. They all bowed to her, if not in the literal sense. Not yet. This would be her chance to find some scrap of sense and change and hope out there in the universe, else die in its seeking. Maybe it would merely serve as a reprieve – a brief respite – from the heat and death surrounding her below the hilltop. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>In their convents, the Pythia held abilities far surpassing those of the crumbling cities and death-age towns below. The inherent telepathic abilities of their species were enhanced through their arcane arts, and those most gifted in the realms of precognition, of touch telepathy and empathy, were taken to their convents and temples to assist the Pythian order. There were stories of those with abilities so volatile that they must be kept locked away from the rest of society. A single touch could trigger an onslaught of emotion; thoughts and sensation stretching as far as memory held weight. All experience and all-feeling stuffed into a deadly moment. These abilities varied greatly across the population, often latent, else unpredictable, emerging only in situations of high stress or overwhelming stimulus. This was just another pitfall of their species that the inventor sought to change. It was just one of her visions for the life she would create – for the ship was just one of her projects. There was also the machine. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Its mechanics were incredibly complex – its expansive circuitry filled an entire laboratory with its canopies of wires, overhanging tanks of fluids and tubes of chemicals. It was constantly fed and fuelled by chemicals, its glassware in-set and dripping with an elaborate array of feeders and siphons – of springs and servos and spinners and spools. It wove life from light, from energy. With it she hoped to fashion a form of life that could endure beyond their own, persist despite the desolate landscape, and continue on the path of science. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>With the machine, she made a child. There were experiments before him, and there would be experiments after. In the past, they had been crude lifeforms, some living a life behind glass with eyes never opened, and minds leveraged wide. Her creatures were grown from tissue samples and strains of cells, multiplying, molding themselves into mimicries of life, and the newest iteration was close to perfect, in theory. His mind was perfectly formed – just like that of an ordinary child – although this proved to be a hindrance at times, especially when she was trying to get him to cooperate. Like any child, he didn’t like to be cooped up in small spaces, asked too many questions, liked to make a mess. Still, she felt a certain parental protectiveness over him, because he was her creation, despite the disgust, and the self-repulsion, with which she regarded his more monstrous predecessors, locked away behind glass, fermented, pickled liquid coating corpses in the dark. It was necessary. That was the simple fact that drove her through the nastier aspects of her work. Nobody else was prepared to do it. If she had to carry this village, this plain of dusky cliffs, or very well her entire species from the death-throes of extinction, then she would. She had to, because that’s who she was. Helper, healer. Doctor. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>...</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>But to the boy she was a mother. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The child knew that he was made in a machine. People weren’t supposed to be made in machines, which was why the townsfolk were wary of him. News travelled fast in the town, and with the mystery that surrounded the facility on the hill, wild speculation warped news into high-speed, exaggerated rumour. A creature of twisted science; pristine nature skewed and ruined. He scared them. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The boy was made in parts; wire-wrapped and glass-hewn, slides of cells and petri-dished tissue plucked apart and mixed together in a maelstrom of light. Metal to hold the bones, fluid coating the form, feeding it. Patchwork child. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His mother said that his creation was a wonderful thing, that it was the only way forward. Someday, she said, everybody would be made in machines, because their bodies weren’t working anymore. The skies weren’t working either – golden smog, smoke and dust. The suns were too hot and the ground too dry. The world was too empty, but she could make it better, he would make it better. She said that sort of thing a lot; grand words for grander stages. The words weren’t meant for him, and he often didn’t understand them, but he nodded along all the same. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“You know,” she said (once, and on scores of other occasions, cherished times, in subtly different ways), soft-voiced, fingers trailing through his hair. “There were fields of grass – crimson, long and lustrous. The trees had pale leaves that glittered silver in the sun.” Moments of intimacy were few and far between, but the scrap of her ship, tinkered upon in the night hours, seemed to draw sentimentality from her like a tap to a sweet-sapped tree. “There was snow on the mountains – like cold sand, but softer, so cold it would turn your fingers red and numb.” He tried to picture what she spoke of, and knew that she, too, was attempting to imagine the image. A memory calcified to a fairytale in the act of the long, slow forgetting. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He called her his mother because she presented herself as such, and offered him the only semblance of love he’d ever known, though he heard the scientists talking behind his back. He was good at spying upon these secret conversations, good at going unnoticed, staying undercover – and they said he had to pretend he had a mother, because he was made in a machine. He had to pretend he was loved and alive and normal so he didn’t turn out wrong. He wasn’t born like other things were, either – he was pushed out a little later, further formed. The first couple of years in a tank, and laced through with wire. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He spent much of his time with the other scientists of the hilltop facility. They had a lot of tests to run; electrodes on his skull, feeding loud machines that growled and struck talons into him like animals. Needles pushed into his arms, and wires, too. Made in a machine. They were very careful of him at first, and didn't let him leave the hilltop house. His mother, especially, wouldn’t let him leave, said he should be careful not to get hurt, otherwise a lot of hard work would go to waste. As time went on, the staff grew far less vigilant, far less interested (for there were a great many other experiments and projects to attend to) – the boy was easily able to slip away from the facility and explore the village below. None of the other children would speak to him. Made in a machine, his mother would say, and that would only ever scare them. All the things in the world that were great and new and exciting scared them. Change scared them, with their runes and smoke and precognition. Old magic, but his mother said that the old magic had failed them now, and the world was withering away. A great age was ending, and a new dawn was on the way. They would be left behind, his mother said, all those afraid, superstitious people. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He would sit on the hilltop, beneath the burnished walls of bronze and their ancient, cyclic texts, and watch the stars. In the languages of magic, the stars were markings of fate, instruments meant to read the future. To his mother, they were real, they were just as reachable as the dust beneath his feet. The thought made him smile, because it meant there were places other than this. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It wasn’t only his body that was different, in the way that it was made, and grown, his mind was different too. There were buried abilities in their species, his mother said, powers of the mind, never fulfilled, due to the lethargy of their brains, those large, complex, </span>
  <em>
    <span>stubborn </span>
  </em>
  <span>muscles. They connected with the world and its forces, the body, all those intricate paths of nerves, far more deeply than regular tasks of moving and speaking and thinking allowed. Minds could communicate with one another – such similar entities, separated only by the fact that they were housed in different containers of flesh, cages of bones. It was something she improved in him when he was made, engineered within him, and continued to perfect as he grew. He had to relay facts – the colour and the shapes of objects that he couldn’t see, but others could, or words held in their mind, strung along into phrases. It required a bridge of touch, and sometimes of machinery. An electrical kick. This was just another way in which he was better, or at least, a precursor to being better. A prototype. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His mother was always very hard at work, especially on her ship. She said that she was going to ride it all the way to the stars in the sky, and he begged her to let him go as well, because he wanted to see all those lights up close. She got a bit impatient when he begged. He thought that, despite what she said about the old, backwards people in the village, and the Pythia up on the crag, she was a little bit afraid of him too. Sometimes, disgust wrinkled her lips and embittered her gaze, and he recognised the look because the others in the facility wore it with far less attempted obliquity. She said she was going to look for a faraway planet, it was close in the sky, blue-green.This world might have people just like theirs, they might have water, and plants and animals. It could be somewhere new to live, hold secrets to curing disease, or populating the soil. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>On the day the inventor’s ship was set to leave, the boy didn’t know what to feel. Part of him yearned to see the places she talked about with such wonder, and resented his abandonment. He was afraid of being left here unloved, and that she might never return – yet he was excited for the new freedom her leaving would afford him. His mother was the only one who still cared to keep him from the village below, though he didn’t understand why. He was too naive to realise just how expendable he was, how very replicable, improvable. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He watched the ship take off while the people in the village looked on without appearing to – peeping through the cracks in their doors, slips in their curtains; parted fingers pressed over their eyes. The Pythia on the crag above had publicly denounced his mother’s efforts – they taught that the stars were not a place open for them to visit, to soar amongst. The stars were a place for the Gods – the eternal beings that resided beyond the black sheen of night. His mother scorned them. It was a wonder the Pythian powers had never sent their dwindling militant forces down from the mountain to burn the facility to the ground. The ship flew, despite the curses the Pythia had supposedly cast upon the doomed vessel, and the populace watched, with hope buried beneath their disapproval. With that, his mother was gone. While the scientists and apprentices carried on with the usual tests, and would make sure he was in his bed at night, suitably hooked up to all his required contraptions, they were too busy with their other projects to notice if he slipped away. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He cherished his time away from the laboratory, despite the people below that shunned him. There were scars on his body, long faded to white lines and soft, purpled rings. He could hide them with long sleeves and high collars. His hair grew in dark tufts over the surgical scars on his head, and the singed spots where electrodes were pasted and primed. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Often, he would make the trek up the narrow, rock-hewn path and climb the sheer, jagged cliffside to the top of the crag overhanging the village. He would stand atop the jutting, red edge and see the village spread out beneath his wind-stung stare, and trace the dark shapes far below. The people were as small as ants, as if he could crush them all with a single, misplaced step. On the horizon, farther into the sweeping sandstorms than his feet would ever take him, there was a mountain, and upon its lofty peak stood a great and intricate edifice. A palace – the seat of the Pythian sisters. Its spires twisted in defiant contrast against the orange sky, sharp as needlepoints, bent and brutal. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>When he tired of the dusky caverns, the flat, dry mud plains, the gritty, open air, he would venture down to the village. He liked to lurk around the marketplace and watch all manner of people pass through – it made him feel a part of a world in which he was unwanted and unable to fit. There was little of worth to trade in a dying world, but economies could be resilient. The townsfolk sold bowls of steaming stew or soup, watered down, dashed with ever decreasing chunks of the demented birds that still persisted to fly, the lizards that scurried between the rocks. They sold fabrics and dyes – though the crops to weave the stuff were rare and growing rarer, and the flowers that produced the dyes were rarer still. There were shoes and pots and hardy grains – people selling services to clean, cook, build, create. There were beaded cushions, scent-laced candles, books of prayer and old tales. Musicians would perform in the centre of the throng, near-drowned out by the sounds of deals being made and gossip being passed along. Sometimes, even the Pythian sisters would wander down from their faraway convent. Their faces were always veiled, and their arms inked with strange tattoos that seemed to blight the air around them. They always moved in packs, and never spoke. They were supposed to be able to see the future – that’s what the whispers told him, the stolen conversations exchanged between merchant and customer, hermits and beggars and sellers. Beyond their words were their thoughts, writhing just below the surface, so easy to fish out, to fall among. The people gathered, whispered, withered – there were fewer of them all the time, and barely any children. That was why, his mother said, they needed the machine. They needed hundreds of them, maybe thousands – but they weren’t good enough yet, and neither was he. The boy was just a prototype. He was just the blueprint for the age on the horizon – the master of a new race at its dawn. </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. The Explorer</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Tecteun reaches the surface of an unexplored planet, and finds a strange girl beneath a strange light.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Incredibly, and to what she would never have admitted was her own surprise, the inventor’s spacecraft worked. Not only did it launch from the planet’s surface, unexploded – recycled mechanisms and all – but it made it past orbit; one tank ejected, two, three, canisters orbiting the crimson planet. It flew – seven months out in the vacuum, right on course. She aimed her trajectory for the closest of the observable planets, those swollen spools of promise. It was deep, clouded blue, and richly green – tempting in its fruitfulness. The inventor, the explorer, saw her planet from afar as a balled, crimson inferno. The sky beyond its stifling confines was clear and smooth – black, indifferent. It held secrets, she was sure of that. It held secrets, and she would discover them all. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She landed on the great blue planet – the rusted metal hull of her ship, scraping sparks against a plateau of hard, compact stone. Grey – cold-hued in a way nothing on her planet ever was. She marked the coordinates of her ship on a computational device – a machine of her own invention, with a simple screen and input controls, set to catalogue the surrounding dimensional space and take readings from its lifeforms. The plateau marked a clearing in the dense vegetation standing thick on all sides. The deep green hues and brightly-coloured flowers were a shock to her eyes. After some preliminary atmosphere checks, she found the air perfectly breathable, and the magnetic pressures near-identical to her home planet. It felt too good to be true. The air itself, as she allowed herself her first breath, was thick with humidity and the sweetness of pollen and dew. Above, the clouds hung bloated and grey with promised storms, set to spill forth clean rains. Her instrument – as it measured magnetic and electrical disturbances in the air – was drawn inexplicably north, to the source of some great eddy of energy. Civilisation, perhaps, though her sensors detected no radio waves, no concrete attempts on their part to communicate. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>As she progressed, she found that the forest bore no well-worn paths, only bits of broken stone underfoot, moss-covered and half-submerged in the marsh. They were too large and too intently-carved to be random. So there’d been intent here, once, artistry. Had they fled what seemed to her a paradise, or perhaps died, as she feared her people might? She found no clues or carvings, and no people. Only bloated flies buzzing in the thick, humid air. Only strange, thin, shrunken mammalian creatures, stalking the undergrowth. As she travelled, she took samples – a fly in a jar that glowed bright and lamp-like in the night, score of native leaves, roots, and flowers. She skinned one of the small, twisted creatures, and picked apart its bones. She sketched the shapes of their joints, both bone and branch alike, recorded their biological makeup on her device, and journeyed forth towards the mysterious emission. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She walked for two days, by the suns of this world, further here than they were on her own planet. Her warm clothes served her well. She stayed her course towards the field disturbance, the swirl of energy, and soon she saw its rippling effects dashed vibrant across the pale sky. A vortex of sorts; dancing tendrils, violet to indigo to a bright, saturated blue. It hurt her eyes. There was more than beauty lurking in that light – it drew her eye, far past the point when it began to sting, to stain her vision spotty and fogged and ringed like old wood. It settled into a feeling deep in her gut, stone-heavy. It made her eyes swim with stars, and her fingers twitch. She longed to understand it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The forest parted onto a clearing. A plain, and upon the lime strands of perfectly manicured grass rested an expansive platform of white stone. It seemed to glow in the sunlight, and reflect the purple eddy of light overhead. In the centre was a ring of stone, ridged and rounded, and like the trunk of a tree from the shrubs beneath it, a tower reached from its centre high into the wispy, stratospheric clouds. A two-tined edifice, sharp as sword points thrust into the sky, and brewing between its blades was the source of the vortexual light. As she approached it, her neck grew stiff and sore from its craned position, eyes trained ever upwards. She was driven by a fervorous determination, a conviction that all the secrets in the stars lay beyond the light above – her eyes ached, muscles quaked and quivered with overexertion, and she wondered if she would be able to make it back to her little scrap-ship in the woods, and if she even cared. She was driven towards the light, and nothing else – that was, until her eyes flicked down to rest on something she spied below – a dark spec at the base of the tower. She squinted, edged closer, willed the bright violet spots burned into her vision to fade, and distinguished the shape of a person. Not just a person; a child. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They stood in the shadow of the great tower, grey, oversized robes cast with a purple sheen from the light above. Strange that, while the explorer’s eyes were continually drawn upwards into its stormy centre, the child seemed uninterested in the light. An occasional glance cast up, and that was all. Nothing but an idle observation. There was nobody else around – no parents, no people, no buildings at all. On the other side of the white plateau, the pale grass prairie continued in its eerily uniform growth. Beyond it, more trees, and a tangled forest stretching out in all directions, growing thicker and darker to a deep-sea black. The child watched the explorer as she approached. They made no attempt to run or to call out, but simply stood, as if waiting. Coming closer, the explorer bent forwards, softened her shoulders, brokered a smile. She made her eyes soft and kind, and used a voice to match. Upon her proximity, she saw that the child was a girl – dark skinned and dark haired, with wide, black eyes that gleamed above the white, smooth stone below. She smiled. It was patient, trusting. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Are you lost?” the explorer asked. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She didn’t speak. Her clothes were strange – heavy and encumbered. They bore indecipherable markings embroidered in dark lace on the cuffs, hem, and collar. Over the grey, thick fabrics, she wore a long vest-like coat of warm yellow. Braided ropes and delicate chains hung around her neck bearing charms and talismans, and her tightly curled hair was pulled back with silver pins and yellow silks. The explorer edged closer, bending down to one knee. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Can you understand me?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The child nodded, slow, wary. The explorer gazed into her eyes and searched her for some hint of abnormality, of otherness. It wasn’t there – not tangibly, anyway. There was something about her that drew the eye like the light above. Strange, that she could understand her speech, the connotations of a nodding gesture. Stranger still was how similar she seemed to the explorer’s own species. She wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the village back home – except, perhaps, for her peculiar garments. It was almost like the child was placed here for a reason, like an offering. Still the explorer gazed about; paranoid, desperate. There was no civilisation in sight. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Can you speak?” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Her lips quivered, struggled to form words, mould themselves around the sounds. “Speak?” she framed it like a question, mimicking the explorer’s tone in its timbre, diction, pitch. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Yes, like that. Do you understand my language?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Again, she nodded. She couldn’t be older than five. “Understand.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The explorer tilted her head to one side and reached out an arm in ofference. “You do?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Do,” she said, quietly. “Yes,” she corrected herself.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It was as if she were calculating something, undergoing some immensely fast adaptation behind the eyes. Fascinating. The explorer pointed to herself with her other hand. The child was still reluctant to take hold of the outstretched offering. “My name is Tecteun.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Tecteun,” she said, gazing down at her shoes, the toes of which poked out from beneath the balled hem of her robes. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Do you have a name?” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She didn’t answer. The child instead turned her gaze up to the tower, still spewing and churning that tornado of light. It buzzed faintly, seeming to sing. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Do you know what that is?” The explorer asked, her own eyes fixed upon it too. She drank in the light with her eyes, greedy for the heady feeling it brought, the lofty nausea and weightlessness. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Hole,” said the child.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“You mean that light, that vortex? Is it a gateway to somewhere?” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She shook her head, looking confused. “Hole,” she repeated. “This is the bottom.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Very interesting. The explorer regarded the child with renewed fascination. Perhaps not from the planet at all, but from somewhere else. “Did you fall through?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Again, she neglected to answer, and the explorer was forced, reluctantly, to abandon her original line of questioning. Whatever the answer was seemed to frighten the girl immensely. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Are you alone here?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The silence seemed answer enough – the wind through the grass beyond, and the crackling energy of the tower above. Supporting this conclusion was the fact that she hadn’t met a single soul save the scampering, twisted creatures and bizarre insects of the forest. Just the ruins of some long forgotten civilisation, and one tower. One girl. Abandoned and alone. Her next question was formed partly from altruism, partly from curiosity, a greedy sort of kindness that only someone such as herself could know. Seeker of knowledge – to help, to heal. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Would you like to come with me?” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The girl had tears in her eyes. She took one final look up into the intoxicating light above, then lowered her gaze to the hand that the explorer still held in extension towards her. Her eyes, dark and gleaming, made their way towards the explorer’s own, meeting them, and held her gaze for the first time. There was something in those eyes that echoed the depth and shade of the light above. Star-like, where the sunlight caught the glaze of tears</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The small, dark hand came to rest in the palm of her own, and the explorer smiled. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She extrapolated as much as she could from the impossible structure at the centre of the stone plateau. The light manipulated by the points of the tower seemed to emanate no heat despite its brightness, and she could find no quantifiable explanation for the feeling it instilled over her; a desperate, awesome dread. All she did know, based on the energy readings rocketing high enough to run right off the measurement scale of every one of her instruments, was that nothing could have passed through that barrier and survived. She scraped away flakes of the stone and deposited them into glass phials, and let her instruments record what they could of the light above. Finally, she concluded that nothing more could be learned of it from where she stood, though her laboratory and the extensive equipment there was bound to hold more substantial answers. The girl, too, likely held answers of her own, but the explorer was wary of pushing her to divulge them. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The walk back to her ship was long, and made longer by the girl, who was young and frail and exhausted. The explorer carried her on her back a fair stretch of the way. The girl had a habit of wandering off, despite the explorer’s increasingly exasperated insistence that she follow her footsteps, or hold her hand. The child’s curiosity was piqued by every passing flower struggling to bloom in the marsh. She enjoyed the sound of the twigs snapping beneath her feet, and tried to chase the animals that stalked the undergrowth. This world seemed as alien to her as it did to the explorer. She asked her as much, whether she had ever seen this place before; the girl answered no. She asked her if she had parents, if the place she had come from looked like this, or if it was different. These more complicated questions seemed to draw her lips shut, her gaze empty, her steps slow. Anything that alluded to the past – the things the explorer yearned to know – turned her away, made her shy, and wiped the little smile off her face. It was infuriating – although, it was very difficult to remain infuriated with the child. Most of the time she seemed so ordinary, and so terrified. On their first night making camp in the forest, the explorer heard her crying. She wasn’t very good at offering comfort, and it didn’t seem that the child would accept it. She shied away from the slightest spontaneous touch. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>On the morning of the second day, the explorer examined her apparatus. She obsessively checked and rechecked the readings she had accrued at the site of the white-pointed tower, eyes raking greedily over impossible numbers, as if this time they might yield something more. From her seat beside her, huddled in the explorer’s bedroll upon the soft undergrowth, the child watched. She was alight with a quiet and intense curiosity, her large eyes trained on the mechanisms the explorer used; the screens and green, wire-framed graphs. She seemed to enjoy watching the spinning dishes and antennae, the dials to twist, buttons to push, and the faint buzzing it emitted as it scanned its surroundings. The explorer thought that she might have found some leverage, some form of bartering. It wasn’t as if the child had much choice but to follow, but the explorer didn’t want to have to force her along if the girl changed her mind. Children could be very temperamental. She had a child of her own back home that reminded her of it constantly.  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Would you like to see it?” she asked the girl, who was regarding the machine with an uninterrupted stare. She nodded meekly, and the explorer leant across to hand the instrument to her. Gingerly, she reached out a hand to tap its metal surface and, curling her small fingers around one of the adjustment dials, she spun it around with a satisfying click. The sound made her smile. “I’m trying to measure the light from the tower where I found you,” she explained, and further pried; “Maybe you can help me. Do you know what it was?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Her gaze flickered up to meet the explorer’s, wide and frightened, and fell back to her hands, still affixed to the machinery. “Dark,” she murmured, and that was all the explorer got out of her. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>On the second night, she had strange dreams. She was falling through a deep and endless dark; thick, sticky, seeming to part around her form like soupy liquid as she slid through it, drowned in it. Far in the distance – it must have been below her, because she seemed to be heading towards it – was a light. A pinprick on the horizon; white and harsh and growing by the moment, sluggishly slow. It dashed her with warmth and a deep, coiling dread. It grated like sandpaper against her eyes, made her skin crawl, muscles atrophy, veins dry up. She wasn’t supposed to go into that light – it didn’t agree with her – and yet it was coming, unstoppably. She felt herself changing to slot into it, and awoke. When she came to her senses, she saw that the child was deeply asleep, sweat aglaze on her forehead despite the cold. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They reached the explorer’s ship on the third day, and she reiterated her explanation to the child that they were going to leave in the vehicle and fly across the stars to a new place, somewhere she would be safe and cared for. The child must have had a place like that once, because her clothes were vibrant and well-crafted, now slightly sodden and scuffed from the marsh mud and sharp thickets. The explorer had asked her about the place she had come from, but again, the child had no answer. As for the clothes, she said she’d always had them. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>There wasn’t much in the way of medical supplies on the ship, and she was lucky she had anticipated a longer trip and brought an excess of rations, seeing as she now had an unexpected passenger to take care of. The child seemed unsure about the voyage she was undertaking, and kept looking back at the door before take off. Once free of the planet’s orbit, she stared through the thick, clouded windows into the void, and the diminishing orb of green and blue shrinking to a spot among the stars. She had no real way to study the child’s biology while aboard the ship, though she did glean that the girl had two hearts, which seemed an almost absurd coincidence on top of the fact that she was akin to her own species in every outwardly conceivable way. A common evolutionary pattern, perhaps? Was life only able to evolve the prowess necessary to conquer and create with that specific arrangement of organs and cells? More crucially, they on their red, dying planet, were not alone in the universe. There were people out there who built impossible structures channelling equally impossible, unmeasurably powerful energies. She longed to meet those who had constructed the tower, maintained the grasslands, raised this child – and what architects they must have been! What visionaries. Lords and conquerors of the universe itself. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Once the flight path was stabilised, and the trajectory set for the long journey home, the explorer tried to talk with the child again. She was sat on an outcropped bench in the body of the ship, cluttered with thick-canvas blueprints, tangled wires, and a clutter of cannibalised machinery. She stared out of the window and into the dark. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“How are you feeling?” Physically, she seemed perfectly well, but the girl was deeply scarred by something. It wasn’t simply slowness, the girl’s mind was sharp – the explorer could tell as much by the way her eyes wandered, and lingered upon the strange with hungry inquisitiveness. There were places her mind seemed unable to touch, like black spots, that forced her into quiet and discomfort. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The girl turned, taking a moment to understand her words. She nodded, a soft smile spreading across her facing, lighting up her eyes. Already, the explorer was beginning to feel a sort of maternal affection for the child – a protectiveness, alongside her rigorous curiosity. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“That’s good,” the explorer smiled, clearing away a tangle of cords, folding a pile of prints and scribblings – she hadn’t expected visitors, after all. She sat beside the child and rested her elbow against the window ledge, her cheek against the cold glass. Gazing into the darkness as it cruised past unadorned, she was reminded of her dream from the previous night – the way the nothingness had glided over her, and the nature of the light’s sting as it encroached. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>After further questioning, the girl did yield one further secret concerning her origins. The child was under the impression that she was dead – or, that she had died, that was her wording. She wouldn’t elaborate, but seemed to believe that the fall from whatever lay on the other side of the light above had killed her.  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The explorer didn’t think much of it – perhaps the girl had fainted, been left with a concussion after the fall. She was very young; perhaps she’d mistaken that brief, dark unconsciousness for death itself. It was evident, at the very least, that she’d been hurt in some capacity, because the inner layer of her robes was near soaked through with blood. Bodily, the girl had no wounds, not even a graze or scratch. Some form of innate healing, whether cybernetically implanted or biologically engineered, she couldn’t tell without proper equipment. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>There was one last thing she wanted to try – a final, desperate attempt for answers. She tried to initiate telepathic contact. It was dangerous – she didn’t even know if it would work, how incongruous their minds truly were. It could hurt the girl, if she wasn’t careful, though the explorer presumed that the opposite was more likely to occur – that the girl would hurt her. There was something deep in her eyes that extended beyond the joyful, blameless smile she so idly wore. There was something to her dream of the dark. Nevertheless, she had to try, had to know, because the gravitas of potential understanding was plain to her. There were powers in this universe that she did not yet understand, and the light held them – that boundless source of energy. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She asked the girl whether her species was telepathic, but she didn’t seem to know what the word meant. Her instruments informed her of a predisposition, though the accuracy of such readings were difficult to ascertain given her differing biology – or, rather, what </span>
  <em>
    <span>should </span>
  </em>
  <span>have been differing biology, but inexplicably was not. So very similar… in the voidful expanse of the universe, what were the chances of a thing like that, if some other power wasn’t pulling the strings? </span>
  <em>
    <span>And who cut the grass, </span>
  </em>
  <span>she asked herself, </span>
  <em>
    <span>who built the tower? </span>
  </em>
  <span>All were answers that the girl held, she was sure of it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The explorer (though, as of late, she put on the voice of the mother) asked the girl to think of the place she had come from – the dark, as she said – and pressed a finger to the side of her head, where her hair was thin, swept back. The explorer had never been particularly predisposed to telepathic abilities. Her aptitude was higher than average, likely only because she actively indulged the ability, and sought to study it. Again, she saw the dark, with more clarity than she had in that half-forgotten dream – deeper and thicker and stickier than the dark that followed day. It flashed across her mind; sharp and loud and quick as a clap of thunder. She broke the connection almost instantly, and the child stared up at her, a curious fear etched across her face.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Just as an aside this story got away from me Majorly, in that I originally planned these chapters set in Gallifrey's ancient past to be really short, like intermittent flashes of the past that wouldn't go that far past what was seen in the show. Then it ended up developing into the main part of the story so oops. Canon is mine now.</p><p>Edit: OK SO. Some mistakes were made</p><p>I didn’t rewatch the episode at all before I started planning this fic, and QUITE a few details seem to have slipped past my radar. </p><p>I looked at the timeless children script and the master specifies that the planet Tecteun found was on the edge of a nearby galaxy. Yeah that seems unrealistic to me. Supposedly she was the first Shobogan to develop space travel there is no way she could have made it to another galaxy first time – right??? That would have to have been one crazy scientific discovery. </p><p>Second thing. The master says that tecteun and the child explored the universe before “finally” returning to Gallifrey. Again, seems a lil unrealistic chibbers. He also specifically says ‘the child grew older’ but she isn’t any older when they return to Gallifrey. Now maybe this is because kids don’t age from this wacky alternate dimension, but she ages later in her other regenerations so this seems inconsistent as well. I’m chalking this up to the master embellishing parts of the tale, making it all sound grander perhaps, idk maybe he doesn’t have all the details either. So yeah, sorry Chibnall I’m changing things. Normally I would like to off canon as much as possible but… eh.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. The Doctor</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The explorer returns, and brings someone with her. The boy is wary. He doesn't like its eyes.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>On the day the explorer’s ship landed, the boy was in the marketplace. It was one of those rare occasions on which the Pythian sisters journeyed down from their mountain convent, led and flanked by guards. People parted obediently as they passed through the crowded aisles, with a mixture of reverence and apprehension. He wondered why they bothered to make the journey at all. They weren’t buying anything or talking to anyone, just holding their esteemed presence over the populace like a storm cloud, a display of power. The boy busied himself with the task of blending in. Slight, dark-haired, dusty-clothed – it wasn’t difficult. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He slunk between the shoppers, caught snatches of their conversations, and eyed the merchandise. Immersed in the act of going unseen, he felt an awful chill, and was rooted to the spot as he felt a pair of eyes lock upon him, with a fierce intention behind their stare. Focused like beams of light, boring hot. He turned and saw one of the Pythian sisters eyeing him from afar. He could still feel those eyes, despite the veil covering them. Even as the crowd across the distance between them – wafting through, insubstantial as smoke – the intensity of her focus didn’t waver. The tiny, ragged child watched as she raised a hand from the depths of a crimson sleeve, and brought it up in a loose fist, as if her fingers were curled around some invisible object. She raised her thumb; poised, and brought it down swiftly, as if to meet a surface, to push a button. Her arm dropped back to her side. She turned away. Time seemed to kick back into motion, and as soon as he could the boy scarpered. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>No one ever noticed him. Lurking between the stalls, living through the pieces of people’s lives they left scattered in thoughts and conversations – that was what he did. This priestess had seen him, and more – seen </span>
  <em>
    <span>into </span>
  </em>
  <span>him – but in her he saw nothing at all, as if there was no mind beneath the veil, just an empty head full of dark smoke. He ran all the way out of the village and to the base of the cliffs sealing the valley. He made the slow ascent; walking, crawling, climbing, until he reached a steady ridge some way up the sheer face. The boy sat and caught his breath, bathing in the silence of the air around him. Just dust on the wind. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>There was a snap, a ripple through the air, and a dark shape soared down through the skies. A ship. The boy watched it come down from his vantage. Here, the view of the sky was clearer than down below – free of the clouds of red dust that hung closer to the ground, kicked up by carts and footsteps and trundling machines. The boy shielded his eyes with a grubby hand, sand lodged thick beneath his nails, and squinted against the sunlight. In the village below, a crowd was gathered in a black mass; ants beneath him, writhing forth from the marketplace, jostling for a better view. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His mother’s ship landed a fair distance away from where it had set off – from the rudimentary metal strut frame and launching boosters rigged in the empty plains by the hilltop. It smoked, its metal plating curled rusted and black from the heat of reentry. The whole machine looked as if it were about to come apart. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>As soon as the ship made its unsteady way to the soil, the crowd began to edge forwards; cautious, and hindered by their numbers. The boy was quicker. He climbed down from the ridge determinedly, grazing knees and elbows on the way down. He went with the half-wild, half-learned elegance of a child with boundless energy, still young enough to lack complete control of his growing muscles. He dropped from what was perhaps a little too high up, fell into a rugged tumble in the sand, swiftly recovered his feet, and began to sprint. He wasn’t all that fast – was never quite able to get his limbs to </span>
  <em>
    <span>go. </span>
  </em>
  <span>It was as if they disobeyed him, struck slightly off-kilter like they weren’t screwed on right. The boy forced himself through the crowd, spurred on by a mixture of anticipation and curiosity. Nobody thought that his mother was going to survive the trip, but he had always believed she would. Afterall, the Pythia had predicted that she would never return. It was over a year since she had left – she would be glad to see him after so long apart. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The boy pushed his way to the head of the throng, chest heaving and limbs jellied from exertion. The door of the spacecraft was already open, and his mother was leading a child out by the hand. Around him, the crowd drew a collective breath, and expelled a smattering of gasps and whispers, their feet dithering restlessly on the sand as they pushed and shoved one another. The child from the ship was hiding behind his mother, squinting, a hand drawn up to shield her face from the blinding sunlight. The boy watched the girl closely as his mother began to speak. A world in the sky, she said, and it was teeming with life. Unimaginable green, indescribable power. Out there, she had found a way to save them, and this claim sent a ripple of whispers through the crowd, a shiver crawling down their collective spine. He could sense it in the air; hope forcing its way through thick disbelief. Nobody spoke up to ask about the child. Its origins seemed as self-evident as they were unthinkable. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The explorer maintained an air of mystery like a shield, to keep them listening. To the crowd, the doctor from the hilltop had done the impossible – disobeyed prophecy, and every rule relayed from the convent on the mountain peak. She had walked among the stars and returned. To them, she was someone to be regarded with great caution. And so, when she began to lead the child forwards, the crowd parted as if she herself were one of the red-robed sisters. She wore a determined expression of indifference on her face as she passed them. Nobody stopped her. Their eyes, however, followed the girl – hands raised to their lips, words whispered behind them, and in the air. The boy could hear it, even the words that went unspoken. The girl was dressed in finery; embroidered as delicately and of fabric as vibrant as a Pythian gown. She was scared, and regarded the red dust beneath her feet with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The thoughts running through her head were more difficult to bring into focus; more feeling than words, senses and images tricky to parse into language. She walked past before he could delve much further.  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He followed their path from a distance, eager to drink up the reactions of the onlookers – a roiling, near-nauseating mixture of fear, intrigue, and timid, blossoming hope. As he walked, his eyes traveled up to top of the cliff face overlooking the village. Two figures stood, red robes rippling in the wind, their silhouettes muffled behind a pall of orange dust. Their hands were drawn up over their eyes like blindfolds. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>...</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Assistants from the hilltop facility traipsed down to collect the explorer’s equipment from the ship, and salvage what they could from the near-wreckage. This was strange, because normally the doctor would do such a thing herself – she wouldn’t normally trust anyone else to touch her machinery without her supervision. So, she was preoccupied. He could hazard a guess with what. He, like everyone around him, was curious about the child, but he also knew he wouldn’t be allowed to ask questions right away. He’d have a better shot of figuring the whole thing out if he bided his time, snuck in the side unexpected, undercover. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Back upon the hilltop, the facility was alive with tension. A nervous, trepidatious excitement hung heavy in the air. The workers loitered in the corridors, halting their work, straining their eyes and ears towards the doctor’s laboratory. The door was shut and the tiny, porthole window was blocked by heads pushing forwards to peek inside. Like the crowd, the scientists whispered; words weaving and spitting in the air, in their minds. No one dared knock when the doctor was at work, even here, where superstition’s hold was at its weakest. It was with equal parts fear and reverence, nervousness and delight, that they observed the specimen the doctor had recovered. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>…</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The doctor spent the remaining day, night, and the better part of the next morning holed up in her lab. When she finally finished running every test she could think of, her face was pallid and pinched, and she was near toppling with exhaustion. She smiled down at the child laying on the curved cot of molded plastic in the centre of the lab. The child smiled back, unphased and unexhausted. It was frustrating, the sheer lack of results she was getting even here with the highest calibre of equipment. She hadn’t dared initiate telepathic contact again, and wouldn’t resort to taking the girl up to the convent either – to the Pythian sisters whose abilities were more refined and reliable. They’d only try to take her away, try to study her with their own arcane methods. They might dispose of her entirely, if they deemed her continued existence a threat to their chosen narrative. They might decide, upon convening with the old and bountiful gods or some other such nonsense, that the girl was a curse, or perhaps a gift – you never could be sure of the path down which their baseless tales would wander. They held the minds of the townsfolk below in their inked and inscenced hands. She would keep the child here, and away from the village as well, if she could. People, especially in times of fear and famine such as this, could be intolerant and violent towards that of which they are ignorant, and there was no doubt that the girl was strange. Strange, and hiding something – some power. There existed a window to the civilisation that birthed her, up beyond that light. The wondrous technology they must have had, compared to her own lowly, superstitious society, cast back from the brink of providence in times of disaster. If only it had been one of their elders she had found instead of a child, silent and fearful.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>For this barrier in language, and the girl’s unwillingness to utilise it, she believed she had a solution; the boy. The doctor had been neglecting lately – even before she had set off on her voyage she had been preoccupied with constructing her ship. His existence promised a time when their dwindling species might reproduce artificially, and shape their own telepathic abilities to an asset rather than what was often a hindrance, but the doctor lacked the technology to produce beings like him on a larger scale. More pressing was the cultural divide that existed between herself and those who worked with her, and the populace at large. While the Pythians held such ideological might over the people here, they would never consent to an artificial solution to infertility and stillbirth. Their support was vital, because their power was absolute. They would die steeped in tradition rather than leap into what was strange, perhaps even morally flimsy, but necessary for survival. For the masses, helping and healing all stopped when the stomach began to turn. What they all needed was a shift in perspective – a revelation so shattering, and so impossibly prosperic, that their hearts would shift, and their minds change. She needed to ignite their hope. A highly advanced civilisation would do it, or a source of perpetual power, as she suspected was the nature of the intoxicating violet light above the tower – nevermind the technological progress that such an asset would provide. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The boy had the ability to sense and internalise the thoughts and memories of those around him with far more focus than any natural-born person, and the machinery with which he interfaced would allow the doctor to study the readings directly. From him, she would be able to gain some understanding of what the girl would not, or was unable to tell. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>…</span>
  
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The boy sat across from the girl (or the alien, the creature) and tried to avoid her eyes. Their minds were bridged by a thoroughfare of machinery; winding fibre-optics and twisted copper coils. They fed into electrodes, cold and gel-pasted to his temples, leading to hers. They were connected in a circle. She wasn’t afraid – hesitant, curious, but not afraid. This frustrated him, because she should have been terrified. He was, in the early days of the experiments, and every time some new technique was tried. Soon enough she would see what it was like, and then she’d be scared too.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Her thoughts were ungainly, tough to digest in a way that was different to the Pythian sisters. Rather than a blankness, her mind seemed too full and messy and vibrant. She was too bright to look at. He wished she’d stop staring. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I want you to show him what you showed me,” his mother was saying. The girl nodded, still looking into his eyes. He shied away from her gaze with a twisted, insolent little frown. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They had his mind wired up to a machine, as they so often did. The doctor altered it to process a different sort of reading – tweaked the window of precision, the scope of its measurements. He asked her what she was looking for, and his mother had answered in a distracted, near-feverish, off-hand sort of way: energy. An energy she found on another world, and sought to understand. There were secrets that the girl (creature) knew, but could not say, and only he could uncover them, because they’d made his mind especially for tasks such as this. He was able to control his own abilities with far more precision than was natural, endure invasions and attacks of a far more intense degree – and he should know, because they’d tried them all. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The room was bathed in soft gold; cyclic runes cut into the walls, glowing softly white; workbenches piled high with glittering glassware and spindly instruments plated with copper and steel. It was warm; the room abuzz with a gentle hum of running machinery as their overworked motors heated the cramped space, filling it with hearty, guttural clicks and calls, like desert birds. The warmth made him sweat through the rough-fabric collar of his tunic. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Place your hand on the table, now,” his mother said, coaxing and sweet. Distinctly, it was the mother’s voice, and not the doctor’s. She could switch between them with ease.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His abilities worked better with touch. The girl (creature) laid her arm on the surface of the bench between them; metallic, littered with hastily-assembled circuitry, rewired, repurposed for this task. Gingerly, the boy laid his own hand on top of hers, his skin clammy and shivering despite the heat. He could feel her in the air like an aura, through the conductors pasted to his skull. He twisted his face into a scowl, and though he could still feel her eyes boring into him like sunlit mirrors, he drew his gaze determinedly away. Instantly, instinctively, he began to extend himself, and behind him, the machine blundered to a start, supplying the connection with a catalysing blast of energy. Mycelium roots spread, black and hungry, found her thoughts, and wrapped around them. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He shut his eyes, and took his place. Start line; ready to sprint. In and out, as fast as possible. Too much time spent in other minds was dangerous. This sort of contact – direct, purposeful, concentrated – was different to those snatches of words and feelings, tangled senses and memories, that he caught passing through the marketplace isles. This was submersion. This was the way you lost yourself, like a reformatted harddrive, corrupting what once existed, scrubbing the source clean. His mother said it was what they did to the Pythian sisters on the mountain. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The machine kicked into grinding, wheezing life, let out a roar; a crackling spark of current flowed across the circuit connecting the two children, and rocketed through his skull. Starting gun fired off; smoke to the sky, he ran. The ground was steady, a well-worn track – he knew what he was doing, had done it a hundred times before. He was searching for a sealed-off, particular truth, same as always. Nevermind that this truth was usually just a symbol on a card, a word held in the mind, or a number. Something small and easy and quantifiable. That was the usual sort of test. Already he was beginning to sense how dangerous and complex this one was going to be.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His mother was counting on him to do this, and so he would. Bounding along the track; the ground began to slope, to crumble. What began as a mild sense of confusion swiftly grew, sprawling into fear at the base of his throat. Through ribs and skull it swelled as the ground dropped out from beneath him like a trap-door swung open, and he fell. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He could still feel the girl’s (creature’s) eyes upon him, and her hand beneath his own; beginning to twitch, heat to a feverish sweat. The darkness behind his eyelids was not the usual sort, red-tinged by the warmth beyond. It was pure dark, blacker than the night sky except for a pinpoint of light far beneath him. It was snappishly bright, contorting, seeming to reach up into his eyes and dance across the surface of his mind. He fell through the dark, more slowly than a regular fall, a tumble from the cliff face when his climbing grip slipped. It was more like sliding, or drowning. Down he went, towards the swath of light as it swelled. It was like an open mouth. He craned his neck and stared above him; more dark stretching up and up, somehow deepening to something even darker. Emptier than nothing.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The sensations of his waking body faded. There were no eyes upon him, no hand beneath his own. Time slid by as smoothly as the dark, and he felt himself drifting outside of it; dreamlike, it slowed to a treacly drip, and slipped through his fingers like streams of sand. Anchor slow and waterfall rapid – and it seemed to do both, and neither, and tow this impossible line in constant flux. As the light approached, and his white-knuckled grip on what remained of his senses slipped helplessly away, he felt himself compress, and twist, and change. The light was recreating him in its image; weaving, tracing, making. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And he saw the scene his body inhabited from the outside. Two children at the table-ends. A banquet hall, and all the food was metal, lain green and wild-wired, circuitry woven into crowns upon their heads. They were like monarchs. There was no one else. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The girl’s face was twisted in pain, because the boy was gripping her tight enough that her skin was darkening to a bruised black where his fingers dug in, blue with cold. His own face was pinched and pierced with an intense, nauseating fear. The machine behind him was sparking, and the wire canopy linking their minds was beginning to fray, to spark, to glow hot. There was shouting. Hurried mutters, pleading voices, cautioning words – and one shouting over them with a final, feverish authority: </span>
  <em>
    <span>keep it running – keep it on, I said! </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p><span>He was in a body again, but it was not his own, or not yet his own, or never would be his own, because time was sliding; evaporating, falling. Raining up and rising down. The girlcreature’s hands were old and pale. He blinked, and they were dark and small, and there was no purple fabric curled between his fingers, no wooden, tea-stained desk between them. No pedestal, no ornamental shield of glass. The illusion shattered, and he felt the darkness tug him along, away, upwards, the</span> <span>light reshaping him. It was a memory, he thought, or perhaps a premonition. He couldn’t make his legs move – he probably didn’t even have legs, which was strange, or maybe it wasn’t – he couldn’t be sure, not of that nor of anything else. He was never any good at sprinting.  </span></p><p> </p><p>
  <span>…</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It didn’t kill the boy. The doctor didn’t think she could have ever forgiven herself if it had. She’d gotten carried away, as she often did – so wrapped up her work, that intoxicating search for answers. She had to wrench his hand off of the girl’s because his muscles had set themselves rigid; clasped and cold. As for the child, she seemed frightened into stillness, continuing to stare around at the surrounding machines as they began to spark, and the lights began to flicker and darken. Most of all, she looked in alarm at the boy, who slumped over, head fallen upon the metal surface of the bench. The doctor reassured her with the mother’s voice, dismantled the apparatus with the inventor’s precision, and with the doctor’s careful hands checked for injuries, assessed the damage. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>In the end it was worth it – the experiment gave them valuable knowledge. Drawing from the girl’s memories, siphoned through the boy’s abilities, she had a far clearer picture of energy that parted the skies of the blue planet, and led to the child’s home. This information came in energy levels, spiking sawtooth patterns skewing the neon green pixels of the readout screen into an ever climbing arc. It matched the measurements barely contained by the rudimentary scanning device she had taken with her. She hoped it would be enough to learn more – to study, perhaps even to replicate. She led the child back to the main laboratory, and carried the boy to his bed afterwards. He would have nightmares tonight, she was sure, as his mind clawed its way back to reality. A pity, but it couldn’t be helped. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>...</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The boy sat on the sand outside the facility, and watched the creature play. His head ached, his muscles throbbed, his brain felt worn-through and jellied. Three days had passed since he had awoken in his closet-space of a room, unsure of how long he had slept, exhausted to his very bones. His dreams faded quickly, but he knew they had been tumultuous, confusing. Old hands in his, golden light, four beats. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The creature was playing with a toy spaceship. He saw his mother give it to her – she crafted it from metal scrap and wooden offcuts, carved it to look like the very ship in which they’d returned, like some sort of memento. The creature loved it – and he’d resolved to call her that, because that was all she was. His trip into the dark had made that fact abundantly clear. Brains weren’t supposed to look like that. They weren’t supposed to feel like that. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His mother was happy about something, and that could be very good, or very bad. When she was happy, it meant she had discovered something, or thought up some new, promising method. That meant tests, and, depending on the project, it could mean tests on him. But the creature was her new focus, and he accepted this news with a mixture of relief and envy. Already his mother had been spending more time with her in the laboratory, leaving him with more time of his own. It was a welcome change, though he accepted it grudgingly, because he was supposed to be the blueprint, the way forward. She always made it sound so important, so integral; like it had to be him, his role, his prided place. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>That importance of his used to ease his mind when the pain got bad – unbearable, even. It helped him push through. He thought it eased the doctor’s mind as well. Sometimes, he saw regret in her eyes, or a tear, when he couldn’t stop himself from crying out. Mother and doctor would merge. Sometimes, but not often.  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The creature was barefoot, scuffling along the red sands, eyes following the arc of the ship balanced in her palm. Why wasn’t she scared? After everything he’d seen in her head – those memories – he knew she should be terrified, yet she seemed to regard the world with nothing but a quiet curiosity, a light and joyful wonder. It occurred to him that she might be the only child that would ever consent to be his friend, that would ever speak a word to him that wasn’t a sharp whisper behind the hand, with an accompanying shock of fear through the mind, but even this didn’t shift his stubborn resolve. She creeped him out, that was the fact of it. She wasn’t right. Sometimes, he caught her staring at him, and wondered if she was going to say something. So far, she hadn’t. Maybe she was scared of him, too. He hoped she was. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His mother kept the creature to herself, locked away in the main laboratory most of the time, and when she wasn’t she would be out on the sand with her stupid ship – skipping across the dunes, building sculptures in the sand, muttering games to herself. He tried, on occasion, to sneak a glimpse into the laboratory through its little porthole window, and sometimes even saw her lying there on the bed, his mother pacing around or working away at one of the benchtops. He knew she was looking for something. He wondered if the darkness; that strange, thick, timeless stuff. She had asked him about it after he woke up, and seemed a little angry, though resigned, when he hadn’t been able to tell her a thing. Most of what he had seen and felt faded from his mind swiftly as a dream, and what remained was too strange to describe. He didn’t understand why his mother wanted to find a thing like that.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>… </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And so the days passed as such; the girl slept in a dim, blue-lit annex off the main laboratory, a storage extension repurposed into a bedroom – crammed white cot and all. The boy slept in a room similarly ill-suited to the act, and similarly separate from the dormitories of those scientists and proteges who lived in the facility full-time. They took their meals in an old, expansive hall, graceful as it was falling from it. High vaulted ceilings, long wooden tables, chipped greystone floors. Great steel fans shuddered and strained to stifle the hot sunlight that glared through the long arched windows, the glass greyed and grubby with heat damage, caked in their cracks and seams with orange sand. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It wasn’t often that he saw the creature, sometimes he even allowed himself to forget about her altogether. She was confined to the laboratory more often than not, and he was barely in the facility – for there were caves to explore, cliffs to climb, and people to watch. He sat upon the roofs of the facility, slunk through its many corridors, delved into its many secrets. He poked around in the old lecture halls where people had once stood and taught raptly-listening crowds,  now crammed with boxes of laboratory equipment and shelves housing stores of food and chemicals and water, siphoned and imported from the rare, far-off places where it still endeavoured to flow.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>There were other places like this – or so his mother said – old bastians of science, stragglers carrying on the largely abandoned work of universities and laboratories. Signals would occasionally break through, received by a tenuous network of radio towers, propagated by those few unmaintained satellites still orbiting the planet. He wondered if there were other children in these places, ones that were made like him. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>...</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Don’t you get bored of playing out here?” The creature jumped at the sound of his voice, and her arm dropped, pulling the toy spaceship out of its floating arc through the burnt orange sky. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Everyday for a week he found her out here, with the same toy in her hands, the same vacant smile upon her face. Sometimes, he caught her staring out at the village below with wide, curious eyes. He felt her wonderment carried on each fold and pass of the arid, shallow breeze.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The creature watched the people moving around down there; dark shapes plodding along formlessly on the ruddy soil below, in and out of buildings of wood and metal and old stone. He remembered feeling the same way, and how long it took for him to pluck up the courage to sneak away and see it all up close. His mother was very good at making things seem dangerous that weren’t really dangerous at all. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Today, the creature was up even earlier than him. Perhaps hadn’t slept at all, perhaps she didn’t even need to. Again, she was dragging that toy ship across the sky before her eyes; landing it upon the ground, dragging it through and making patterns in the sand, digging pits with her fingers, building mounds of crumbling grains that never stood for long. The sand up here was too dry for building, but she didn’t seem to care. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“No,” she answered, after a moment’s hesitation. She looked up at him with slight trepidation, masked rather obviously with a deliberate frown. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The boy gazed down at his feet – rugged, sole-worn shoes upon them, unlike hers, bare and dust-coated. He still didn’t like her eyes. “Why don’t you go down to the village?” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“She says I’m not allowed.” Even as she said it, her gaze wandered longingly down towards the jagged silhouettes of the buildings, dark under the light of the rising suns. The morning sky’s pale, sulphuric yellow took on their light like ink in water, spreading vibrant orange through the haze like licks of flame. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Do you want to though?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>A beat, in which she hesitated once more, and stared at the ship clutched in one grubby hand. “No.” Her tone was unconvincing. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Can I see the ship?” He reached out towards it before he’d even finished asking, but she flinched away instinctively. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“No,” she said again, and clutched it tightly to her chest. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The boy frowned, and turned away. “Fine,” he muttered. “Have fun being boring.” He could feel her eyes on him as he walked away. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>...</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The following night, he aimed to sneak out under cover of darkness. It was the best time to do so, with the staff of the facility unlikely to notice his absence, and nobody around in the village. That meant no noise; no thoughts trundling through the air, light and spiked like tumbleweed; no whispers, no mechanical carts kicking up dust into his nose; no bustle. The hilltop facility was always crowded, always cluttered, always impossibly noisy – with machines and voices and thoughts alike. Besides, it was cold at night, the only time it ever got cold. Winter on their red planet wasn’t really winter, not like the winter in the stories his mother told – snowy mountains and red grass frosted foamy pink – just a duller, blunt-edged summer, colours sapped out of the verdant sky. Night was the only respite from the watchful twin suns, and what replaced their heat was a blanket of twinkling stars. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The creature was already outside. She was lying on the sand with her arms and legs spread out wide, star-shaped herself. She wore soft, long-sleeved robes, cream coloured with red patterns embroidered on the sleeves. They were nicer than his, but he supposed she must be used to nice things, given what she’d been wearing when she had landed; satins and heavy folds of dark cloth. He could have simply snuck away, she seemed oblivious to his presence, enraptured by the stars above. Instead, he approached soft-footed, and sat himself down on the sand beside her, knees drawn up to his chest. Her eyes snapped towards him, as if drawn from a reverie. She propped herself up onto her elbows. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Why are you out here?” he asked, looking down at her. She seemed tense, as if caught in a lie. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Why are you?” she replied quietly, a hint of a smirk on her face, and mischief in her eyes. He almost returned it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Because I want to be.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Well, so do I,” and with that, she rested her head back down on the sand and stared determinedly up into the sky. The stars glittered brilliantly in her glossy black eyes. He stretched himself out and lay beside her. He was curious. He wanted to know, just as his mother did, what that darkness meant, the stuff he couldn’t stop dreaming about. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Do you like looking at the stars?” he asked, hands behind his head, quickly growing numb against the cold sand. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” she mumbled. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Did you really come from up there?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She paused, and for a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer. “I think so.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Don’t you know?” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She twisted her fingers together where they lay against the sand, working them into the fabric of her over-hanging sleeves. The chill of the sand had turned her fingertips pale and purple-tinged. “I don’t remember.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It seemed like a strange thing to forget. “She said she found you on another world.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The creature considered that, and it seemed to cost her a great deal of effort to twist her thoughts into words. “I don’t think I’m from there. That was just the bottom of the hole.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“How can a planet be the bottom of a hole?” She was frustrating; each question she answered only made him more confused, and more curious. She shrugged, the fabric of her robes ruffling against the rough sand. He tried another angle. “What was the planet like? I’ve only ever seen this one. It’s a bit boring.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The creature took a moment to think. “It was green, and really loud. There were funny animals in the woods. She killed one and ate it for dinner.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Oh,” he sniffed. Her robes were thin, she must have been cold. It didn’t seem to bother her. “This planet’s just all sandy, and all the animals are almost dead.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“That’s sad.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Was it sad? It was just the way things were, and it was going to get better. His mother was going to make it better, and somehow she thought this girl and her bottom-of-a-hole green planet were going to do it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Do you want to see the village?” He thought she must have been lying before, when she said she didn’t want to, because her face lit up, and she turned to look at him. Her voice was hushed, conspiratorial. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Now?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“No,” he reasoned, “we should go in the daytime. It’s more exciting when there’s people, and I can show you the market.” The village at night was his own, he wanted to keep it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Okay.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“But you can’t tell her, okay? It has to be a secret.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The creature nodded, and turned back to the stars. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They didn’t talk much after that, just lay there, almost until the suns had risen again and the sky was dusky and ruddish red, teasing the pale orange of morning. She fell asleep at one point, and woke again, and was just as quiet either side. All the while, that prickling sense of apprehension, the unending shiver of unease that accompanied him when she was near, began to subside. His dreams were only dreams, far away and ungrounded. His fear eased away as well, and he expected hers did too. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>…</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It was a few days before they could go out to see the village, because the girl was always needed for something, and when she wasn’t it was him who was called in; routine check ups, but no new experiments. The two children had to line up their schedules. It was clear to him that the doctor was wary to push him after what happened the last time he was forced to initiate contact. It was mid-morning, and his mother was preoccupied analysing the latest dataset she’d extracted from the girl. She wouldn’t see them go. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The best part, he told the girl, was the run down the hill. One side of the hill was craggy red rock, and hewn through it was a packed-dirt path winding down to the base, used for carts and mechanical vehicles that climbed the passage. The side facing the old, drained river was all dune; smooth, soft sand. He demonstrated the artful act of tumbling down it. It was the best part because your legs moved too fast for the wind to catch you, and you kicked the sand up in eddies at your feet, and you descended the slope in a tumult of flailing limbs and ringing laughter. During his own demonstration, he tripped over a few feet from the bottom, and took the rest of the descent at a roll, churning up a whirlpool of dust. Coming to his senses in a heap at the base of the hill, he looked up, smiling wildly. Her small, dark face peered down from the summit, and returned his gesture with a grin of her own.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She yelled a pitchy war-cry and just about flung herself from the edge. She was fast – really, really fast. Her short legs seemed a blur as her robes danced in billowing folds at her calves. She fell down beside him; scratched up and sand-drowned and laughing near maniacally. He wouldn’t have thought she had it in her – always so quiet, so strange, so indifferent. She had always seemed to him to live outside of the moment instead of within it,  like the way he had felt stretched across that expanse of dark, sticky time. The creature came down from the rush almost instantly. Laughter subsiding, she struggled to her feet. Her chest was heaving, cheeks flushed, hair twisted into flyaway curls around her face. She helped him to his feet, because he was still catching his breath. When he touched her, it dredged up memories of the dark, but he pushed them down. He was getting better at that.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>...</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“And you have to stay close by, because there’s lots of big crowds, and you could get lost.” He spoke rapidly, and the girl nodded along, eyes rapt. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They were in the markets. Brightly-coloured canvases stretched canopius overhead. Stalls stood tiltedly-assembled either-side of them, hammered of rare, splintered wood and sheets of corrugated iron, lumps of stone topped with sheets, plastic tables laid over with patterned cloth. The girl marveled at the various trinkets; the metal instruments, the copper pots and tools, the soft, flowing fabrics. Lost in the mass of the crowd, they were difficult to notice. Just another couple of kids, wont to thieve, so best stay wary. The girl was the happiest that the boy had ever seen her; grinning ear to ear, without a hint of her usual shyness. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He spoke in her ear, and despite his proximity, he was barely heard over the surrounding noise. “Do they have markets where you’re from?” She shook her head, still grinning, and he led her onwards. They bought pies from a kindly old baker who, thankfully, didn’t take too long a look at him or the girl – because surely their likeness was known by now, his certainly was. And yes, he had picked the coins from the pocket of a laboratory apprentice, but he would consider that gracious payment for the last few experiments he’d sat through while they tapped away at their instruments. They tucked themselves away in the corner of the hollowed tin warehouse where the market aired, the fallen-in roof opening onto the bright afternoon sky. The pies were warm, the pastry flaky and crisped to a too-dark brown around the edges. Mostly stuffed with legumes, not much too-tough lizard meat, but it was the novelty that made them good, he thought. The girl seemed to like them, or at least she made more of a hasty mess of it. Relative quiet fell in the crowded, stifling, stinking place, and two figures veiled and crimson-clothed walked side-by-side into the warehouse shell; Pythia from the convent on the crag. They were thronged by a pair of guards helmeted in bent and hammered bronze. He could’ve sworn the eyes hidden beneath their veils of mesh and fabric lingered on the corner where he sat with the girl – or perhaps they saw the creature. Sure enough, it soon became apparent that they were heading straight for them. The crowd parted for the Pythia with a high-strung, gut-deep sense of shared unease. The feeling set his hearts pounding, and the girl’s eyes followed their approaching steps; wide and afraid. Her gaze followed the dark-ink cyclic tattoos winding up their arms, the rustling of their draped and trailing robes against the rough-hewn rock and packed soil beneath. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“We should go,” he said, dusting flakes of pastry from his tunic. She nodded, and let him pull her to her feet. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They slunk out one side of the marketplace, out from the shade of the canvas canopy and into the fullness of the suns. Behind him, the girl gasped. He turned to see that she had come face to face with one of the Pythian sisters. There were more than two in the village today, which was highly unusual. How silently they encroached, seeming to glide over the sand. He could never feel them coming either, with their empty heads and all-seeing, shielded eyes. The priestess had one of the girl’s hands gripped in her own, inked and blackened where her tattoos of embellished words and symbols bled into her skin. The girl pulled back, but the sister’s grip only tightened, and from beneath her veil, in a voice that wasn’t supposed to be heard beyond the convent walls she rasped; </span>
  <em>
    <span>“timeless –” </span>
  </em>
  <span>but with a final tug, the girl pulled herself free, and the boy grasped her other hand, ready to pull her into a run. Before he could, she raised one knee and stamped her foot down onto the sister’s sandalled toes where they poked beneath the hem of her gown. She shrieked in pain, and the little girl’s face was overcome with a wild grin; half afraid, half delighted. She was the one to pull him along, as a laugh started up deep in her throat, but he paused to kick sand up into the sister’s veiled face for good measure, and ran cackling after the girl. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And she was fast – she was really, </span>
  <em>
    <span>really</span>
  </em>
  <span> fast. Before long he was heaving and half-dragging his feet as she pelted across the old, cracked roads, blazing hot beneath the suns, becoming rough stone, becoming soft and shifting sands as they got closer and closer to the mountains at the outskirts of the village. They stopped in the shadow of the crag, out of sight of the village. She clutched her chest, twisting up the fabric around her hearts, and sunk to a sitting position upon the sand, cool and muted orange in the shade. She lent back against the rockface and let out a belated sigh. It took him longer to catch his breath, and he could feel his cheeks burning in the heat. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Why did you do that?” he panted, his breathing still shallow. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Because she grabbed me. And they’re scary,” she added, glaring down at the sand. She ran her fingers through it idly. “Who are they?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“They’re the Pythia. They live in the convent on the mountain. You can see it from the top of the cliffs.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She craned her neck to stare at the edge of the cliff behind her, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of it. “I don’t like them.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“The doctor doesn’t like them either. She says they’re afraid of science, and the stars, and they want to let the world die.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Why do they want that?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Because they’re scared of the stuff the doctor does.” He paused before adding, in something of an undertone; “they’re scared of me,” and he puffed out his chest a little, because part of him was proud to disgust the people he was supposed to hate. The backwards people. “They’re probably scared of you too.” Her face fell a little at his words, and she went back to playing with the sand. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I’ll show you next time. We can climb up to the top.” Her answering nod was small and sullen, and she stared down with a puzzled sort of sadness at the ground.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>…</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>There were tubes in his arm and electrodes on his head, but that was normal. What wasn’t normal was that his mother was here to do it. She hadn’t paid him any individual attention in a long while. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Any abnormalities?” she asked, adjusting the positioning of one of the adhesive pads on his forehead, untangling the wires where they spiralled back towards the readout machine. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“No,” he said, because that was the correct answer to the question. “Do you know what that dark stuff is yet?” he blurted out. He still dreamed about it.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She paused in her work, and met his eyes. She hardly ever did that, and hadn’t for a long, long time. His mother looked far older than usual; face pinched, bags heavy and dark beneath her eyes. Her cheeks were sunken in, forehead lined where her brows had been drawn together in concentration for too long. The whites of her eyes held red marks like bolts of lightning, and her hands shook where they held the wires. She looked away, back at her hands, and continued in a conversational manner. “What did you see?” She’d asked him the same question already, after the initial experiment. He couldn't tell her anymore now than he had then; dark, long and stringy and warping all around him. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Just dark,” he said. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I think it could be,” her lips twist into a rueful smile, and her fingers continued diligently in their work, “the space between worlds. That light, I believe, is a form of energy powerful enough to tear into it.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“So, are you going to catch it?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“If I can.” A jerk of the head, and she corrected herself. “Yes, I will.” He wasn’t sure what to make of it. He was still struggling to understand just how the dark was supposed to help. “We need to have another look at it now.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Like before?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Just the memory. I’ve fixed the machine here,” she patted the hunk of metal behind her, and it answered with a heaving, precarious shudder. It was larger than he’d ever seen it before, new parts tacked onto the old husk, augmenting it. “It will be able to get a better picture.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He felt anger bubbling hot in his chest.  “Make her do it.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She sighed, impatient, and got to her feet without looking at him, which only made his frown deepen. She busied herself adjusting a set of sliders, a panel of dials; gearing up the great mechanism. “No.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Why not?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She looked into his eyes; pale and wrinkled and wry. Loveless, he thought, but it was always difficult to tell. It seemed to come and go from her expression like dust haze across the sun. “Because I don’t want to damage her.” The doctor turned back to the readout screen before she could see the hurt flash across his face. He smothered it in a second. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>…</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She said she almost had it figured out, but science requires iteration; multiple trials, multiple variables tested. She had to be sure that she captured the full scope of the data. For him, that meant a few more trips down to the dark. He was a slider under the microscope, with a little piece of her lodged in there, a window to the dark. Signal caught, copied, encoded; replayed. He relayed it like a radio tower. These were the things that he was for. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He didn’t like the memory. Memories, his mother used to say, were more than just an image in the mind, they were tied to the nerves, and the hearts, and the world. All the world was perception, a sliver of the universe gazing at the whole, so a memory perfectly captured, and perfectly passed on, was as concrete as the real thing. Minds were soft machines, and could store and process data like any receiver. That was just another vision she had, for this grand world in her mind.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>…</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The suns were hot (they always were) beating relentless against his dark hair. His toes were buried beneath the sand, cooler beneath the top layer of scorched grains. His skin was pallid, his throat raw. He felt sick; pushed back into his own head too many times. The creature was playing with the ship again, standing some feet away, spinning on the spot too-fast and bringing it down to crash. She skidded the sand up into a blast cloud. The doctor didn’t want to damage her, and he knew why, because he was just the prototype. There were experiments before him, there would be experiments after. If he were to break she could just make another but </span>
  <em>
    <span>her </span>
  </em>
  <span>– she was one of a kind, from the stars and the tarry, treacle-dark, and the snapping too-bright light on the bottom-of-a-hole green planet that was going to save them all. She was so much more than him. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Do you want to do something?” He hadn’t noticed her approach, fast and quiet through the sand. She was panting, little chest heaving beneath her robes. The stitching on the sleeves shined like gold. He blinked up at the suns, trying to focus on her face, pulling himself out of his thoughts. “Can we go to the market?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She really didn’t understand how things worked, the things you could do and the things you couldn’t, when the doctor was watching. “Can’t. She’s watching from the window by the entrance.” The first thing she did was look, which showed how good she was at being conspicuous. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Can we still?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“No,” he snapped.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Can we go on the rocks? You said you would.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>His stubborn mood stifled the excitement leaping up to his throat; half begrudging, half delight. He wanted to show her how to climb, point out the shape of the mountain in the distance. He wanted to move, because when he sat still for too long the dark always caught up. “Okay,” he agreed, though he made a show of being hesitant. It was like a game of pretend. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He didn’t take her all the way up, because the doctor still watched from the entryway where it stretched from the main building to the winding path up the hill. She was taking a break, which she didn’t do often. She definitely needed it. The boy hoped it meant that things were calming down. For him, that might mean fewer tests, and better dreams. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They went up the path. There were parts where the ascent was more of a trail than a climb, if you took the long way around. He would start her off with something easy.  At the top, on the flat, the peak of the mountain was barely visible, a hazy yellow form on the horizon. It poked over the edge of the next layer of looming crag-tops cut out of the cliff-face. The girl seemed intrigued by the sight of the towers twisting muted black from the mountaintop. He didn’t know why she cared so much about the convent. The sisters had always scared him, but he knew they weren’t important anymore, because they were scared, and backwards. They were going to die. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“It’s better when you go all the way up,” he explained. “But you’re new at this.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She looked disappointed. “Can’t we go higher?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“You’re not supposed to get hurt. I don’t want to get in trouble. Anyway, the doctor’s watching.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Her eyes flashed with understanding, and she nodded. It felt like they were sharing a secret. The girl stepped out towards the edge. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“The village looks so small from up here, doesn’t it?” he remarked, watching the way her breath fluttered as vertigo gripped her stomach and pulled. She was grinning. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She chuckled slightly. “Everything’s small here –” her voice drew out into a sing-song tone, airy and high-pitched. She did this sometimes; went quiet, strange, off-kilter in the way her eyes wandered and her neck moved and her voice rang. “ – even on the ground.” She hummed a tune to herself that he didn’t know, and pulled something out from the pockets of her robes – and of course she brought the stupid ship. She dragged it through the air and paid him no mind as he stared, and saw, beyond the strange-voice and the wide-eyes, burgeoning beyond the moment; dark. Sliding up the sides, filling, drowning. She still wasn’t scared – why wasn’t she scared? She flitted the ship about in the air, made the sounds of its flight, and gazed upon it adoringly. It was all game to her. All that time in the laboratory and she didn’t seem to feel a thing, to bruise or cry or hurt. It wasn’t fair. He wanted to take the ship and throw it from the cliff side, see if it could really fly, shatter her pretend. He began with step one, and tried to snatch the ship from her hands.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It went as most childhood scuffles did; half-play, half-aggression, both springing to the defensive. Her; smaller, standing closer to the edge. The soles of her shoes skid backwards on the gravel, and she tripped over a jutting stone. Her skinny arms flailed as she lost balance, tilted, began to fall. Maybe he could have grabbed onto her if he were faster, but the part of him that saw the closeness of the edge hadn’t quite caught up to the part of him that wanted to see her hurt. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She kicked up a shower of red dust as her feet slipped from the edge, the cliffside crumbling under her weight. The ship slipped out of her hands. Her eyes were wide with shock, in the final moment that he saw them – the last time he ever would, at least on that face. He remembered the way they reflected the stars, but they were empty now. No stars, just fear. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Slap, crack, crumple, like an ember crackling in a fire, spitting ash as the dust settles, all within a splintered moment. He ran to the edge, keeping back from the newly eroded precipice. The doctor was running from the facility, and the girl’s figure was small and shrunken and bent all wrong. The doctor knelt beside her, bent over her, hands on her cheek. The sand beneath her form was redder than the rest, and spreading its colour like sunlight expanding over the horizon. Just as the feeling was beginning to sink in; heavy-dropping thud, the echo of that blood and bone crunching in his gut, there was a spark. The girl was glowing. The doctor stepped back. Around her, the sand was swept up into a spiralling eddy with particles of golden light, and the girl began to burn. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>…</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The doctor didn’t leave her laboratory for a long while; the rest of the day, the night, some hours into the following morning. He watched her emerge while he hid around the corner. In the beginning, there had been a rush of voices and bustling crowds stifled the doctor and the figure in her arms – the new thing that had come out of the light. Eventually they filtered out, and he observed their shock, their confusion, their elation. Outside by the cliffs, there was a round, drying imprint of dark red on the sand, and grains signed black with the creature’s fire. He didn’t sleep that night. His dreams were permeated by dark spirals and singing flames, and the creature’s voice; that little gasp as her feet had slid out from beneath her. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The doctor’s hair was plastered to her forehead in dry and tangled tufts, knees stained with mud where she had knelt as the creature burned. She stormed past him at a feverish pace, oblivious, and he snuck through the door left ajar. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The creature was laying on the examination bed, a steady stream of tubes twisted into a braid protruded multicoloured from her wrist. Her eyes were large and blank and dark. A different shade of brown. He saw her new face properly for the first time. Keeping his footsteps quiet, his quickening breaths still, he approached the bed. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Her eyes flicked towards him as he came. Her skin was lighter, hair longer; it trailed dark beneath her back. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Are you still the same?” He asked slowly, coming to stand beside the bed. He stayed back a few steps, wary. Eroded precipice; he wasn’t quite sure where he stood. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>With movements slow and lethargic, her eyelids flickered, and she nodded, slight and drawn-out. She seemed exhausted.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Do you remember me?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Lips parted, speech slurred. He thought she must be drugged with something to keep her still. “Yes.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“I’m,” he hesitated, looking down at his feet, “I’m sorry I made you fall.” </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“It’s okay.” Voice hoarse through gritted teeth. She was talking through pain, more than could be numbed, it seemed. Her gaze (still dark, still starry, still reminding him of that sticky, scary nothing) moved across the room, and he followed their path. They landed on the toy ship, scuffed with flecks of sand, wings broken off. Crash-landed. “Do you want to play with it?”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “No. It’s yours.” And it was broken anyway, why would he want it now? </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Can you see me?” It was barely a whisper, he thought that the anesthetic must be dragging her under again. He knew what it felt like, the way your eyelids drooped heavy as steel and your limbs dropped to struggling rest as it fell upon you like a blanket of sand. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” he said, though he wasn’t sure. He saw the creature, but not the girl. He didn’t have time to decide for sure, because she was already asleep. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'm going to try for fortnightly publishing. MMaybe weekly if I actually write this dang thing. I'm getting a bit stuck in places and this story is gonna be looooong<br/>I'm probably going to do a big edit once it's all finished and make sure it all ties together nicely, and I'll probably format it in a lil pdf like I did with The Prodigal Daughter (even tho I was reading it recently and found a bunch of typos ugghhhhh) </p><p>also let me know what you think in the comments :)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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